Friday 29 June 2018
Android Nougat now the most-used version, Oreo crosses 1 per cent share in latest distribution numbers
As per the latest distribution chart, Android Oreo (8.0 and 8.1) is present in 1.1 per cent of all active Android devices. This is slightly better than last month where Oreo accounted for only 0.7 per cent of all active devices. A lot more smartphones in recent weeks have started receiving the Oreo update including the OnePlus 5T, Moto X4 and Honor 8 Pro among others. It isn't all that surprising considering the time it takes for OEMs to push out new Android updates. For a lot of people still, the version that comes out-of-the-box is usually the only version. they ever get.
Monday 25 June 2018
Ford to unveil Figo-based cross hatch on January 31
Ford has announced it will take the wraps off its new Figo-based cross-hatchback on January 31, 2018. The cross-hatch has been spied testing a number of times and we have had an. exclusive drive in a pre-production prototype of the model, as well.Reportedly named the Freestyle, the crossover version of the Figo will sport rugged, SUV-esque cosmetic changes, including a higher ground clearance, roof rails, body cladding, fatter tyres and larger wheels.On the inside, lower-spec variants of the Figo-based crossover will share the 6.0-inch touchscreen infotainment system with lower-spec EcoSport trims. Higher-spec models will have the 8.0-inch system with Ford's Sync 3, instead. The top-spec trims will also get six airbags, ABS and ESP.The highlight of what is expected to be called the Ford Freestyle is under the bonnet. A new 95hp/115Nm, 1.2-litre, three-cylinder petrol engine from the carmaker's Dragon series, will debut on the cross-hatchback. Selendroid is used in android mobile testing.It will be mated to a new five-speed manual transmission from Getrag, replacing the older IB5 unit.
Thursday 21 June 2018
Basic Questions
Basic Questions
Next: Branches of AIUp: WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? Previous: WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?Q. What is artificial intelligence?A. It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable.Q. Yes, but what is intelligence?A. Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world. Varying kinds and degrees of intelligence occur in people, many animals and some machines.Q. Isn't there a solid definition of intelligence that doesn't depend on relating it to human intelligence?A. Not yet. The problem is that we cannot yet characterize in general what kinds of computational procedures we want to call intelligent. We understand some of the mechanisms of intelligence and not others.Q. Is intelligence a single thing so that one can ask a yes or no question ``Is this machine intelligent or not?''?A. No. Intelligence involves mechanisms, and AI research has discovered how to make computers carry out some of them and not others. If doing a task requires only mechanisms that are well understood today, computer programs can give very impressive performances on these tasks. Such programs should be considered ``somewhat intelligent''.Q. Isn't AI about simulating human intelligence?A. Sometimes but not always or even usually. On the one hand, we canlearn something about how to make machines solve problems by observingother people or just by observing our own methods. On the other hand,most work in AI involves studying the problems the world presents tointelligence rather than studying people or animals. AI researchersare free to use methods that are not observed in people or thatinvolve much more computing than people can do.Q. What about IQ? Do computer programs have IQs?A. No. IQ is based on the rates at which intelligence develops in children. It is the ratio of the age at which a child normally makes a certain score to the child's age. The scale is extended to adults in a suitable way. IQ correlates well with various measures of success or failure in life, but making computers that can score high on IQ tests would be weakly correlated with their usefulness. For example, the ability of a child to repeat back a long sequence of digits correlates well with other intellectual abilities, perhaps because it measures how much information the child can compute with at once. However, ``digit span'' is trivial for even extremely limited computers.However, some of the problems on IQ tests are useful challenges for AI.Q. What about other comparisons between human and computer intelligence?Arthur R. Jensen [Jen98], a leading researcher in human intelligence, suggests ``as a heuristic hypothesis'' that all normal humans have the same intellectual mechanisms and that differences in intelligence are related to ``quantitative biochemical and physiological conditions''. I see them as speed, short term memory, and the ability to form accurate and retrievable long term memories.Whether or not Jensen is right about human intelligence, the situation in AI today is the reverse.Computer programs have plenty of speed and memory but their abilities correspond to the intellectual mechanisms that program designers understand well enough to put in programs. Some abilities that children normally don't develop till they are teenagers may be in, and some abilities possessed by two year olds are still out. The matter is further complicated by the fact that the cognitive sciences still have not succeeded in determining exactly what the human abilities are. Very likely the organization of the intellectual mechanisms for AI can usefully be different from that in people.Whenever people do better than computers on some task or computers use a lot of computation to do as well as people, this demonstrates that the program designers lack understanding of the intellectual mechanisms required to do the task efficiently.Q. When did AI research start?A. After WWII, a number of people independently started to work on intelligent machines. The English mathematician Alan Turing may have been the first. He gave a lecture on it in 1947. He also may have been the first to decide that AI was best researched by programming computers rather than by building machines. By the late 1950s, there were many researchers on AI, and most of them were basing their work on programming computers.Q. Does AI aim to put the human mind into the computer?A. Some researchers say they have that objective, but maybe they are using the phrase metaphorically. The human mind has a lot of peculiarities, and I'm not sure anyone is serious about imitating all of them.Q. What is the Turing test?A. Alan Turing's 1950 article Computing Machinery and Intelligence [Tur50] discussed conditions for considering a machine to be intelligent. He argued that if the machine could successfully pretend to be human to a knowledgeable observer then you certainly should consider it intelligent. This test would satisfy most people but not all philosophers. The observer could interact with the machine and a human by teletype (to avoid requiring that the machine imitate the appearance or voice of the person), and the human would try to persuade the observer that it was human and the machine would try to fool the observer.The Turing test is a one-sided test. A machine that passes the test should certainly be considered intelligent, but a machine could still be considered intelligent without knowing enough about humans to imitate a human.Daniel Dennett's book Brainchildren [Den98] has an excellent discussion of the Turing test and the various partial Turing tests that have been implemented, i.e. with restrictions on the observer's knowledge of AI and the subject matter of questioning. It turns out that some people are easily led into believing that a rather dumb program is intelligent.Q. Does AI aim at human-level intelligence?A. Yes. The ultimate effort is to make computer programs that can solve problems and achieve goals in the world as well as humans. However, many people involved in particular research areas are much less ambitious.Q. How far is AI from reaching human-level intelligence? When will it happen?A. A few people think that human-level intelligence can be achieved by writing large numbers of programs of the kind people are now writing and assembling vast knowledge bases of facts in the languages now used for expressing knowledge.However, most AI researchers believe that new fundamental ideas are required, and therefore it cannot be predicted when human-level intelligence will be achieved.Q. Are computers the right kind of machine to be made intelligent?A. Computers can be programmed to simulate any kind of machine.Many researchers invented non-computer machines, hoping that they would be intelligent in different ways than the computer programs could be. However, they usually simulate their invented machines on a computer and come to doubt that the new machine is worth building. Because many billions of dollars that have been spent in making computers faster and faster, another kind of machine would have to be very fast to perform better than a program on a computer simulating the machine.Q. Are computers fast enough to be intelligent?A. Some people think much faster computers are required as well as new ideas. My own opinion is that the computers of 30 years ago. were fast enough if only we knew how to program them. Of course, quite apart from the ambitions of AI researchers, computers will keep getting faster.Q. What about parallel machines?A. Machines with many processors are much faster than single processors can be. Parallelism itself presents no advantages, and parallel machines are somewhat awkward to program. When extreme speed is required, it is necessary to face this awkwardness.Q. What about making a ``child machine'' that could improve by reading and by learning from experience?A. This idea has been proposed many times, starting in the 1940s. Eventually, it will be made to work. However, AI programs haven't yet reached the level of being able to learn much of what a child learns from physical experience. Nor do present programs understand language well enough to learn much by reading.Q. Might an AI system be able to bootstrap itself to higher and higher level intelligence by thinking about AI?A. I think yes, but we aren't yet at a level of AI at which this process can begin.Q. What about chess?A. Alexander Kronrod, a Russian AI researcher, said ``Chess is the Drosophila of AI.'' He was making an analogy with geneticists' use of that fruit fly to study inheritance. Playing chess requires certain intellectual mechanisms and not others. Chess programs now play at grandmaster level, but they do it with limited intellectual mechanisms compared to those used by a human chess player, substituting large amounts of computation for understanding. Once we understand these mechanisms better, we can build human-level chess programs that do far less computation than do present programs.Unfortunately, the competitive and commercial aspects of making computers play chess have taken precedence over using chess as a scientific domain. It is as if the geneticists after 1910 had organized fruit fly races and concentrated their efforts on breeding fruit flies that could win these races.Q. What about Go? A. The Chinese and Japanese game of Go is also a board game in which the players take turns moving. Go exposes the weakness of our present understanding of the intellectual mechanisms involved in human game playing. Go programs are very bad players, in spite of considerable effort (not as much as for chess). The problem seems to be that a position in Go has to be divided mentally into a collection of subpositions which are first analyzed separately followed by an analysis of their interaction. Humans use this in chess also, but chess programs consider the position as a whole. Chess programs compensate for the lack of this intellectual mechanism by doing thousands or, in the case of Deep Blue, many millions of times as much computation.Sooner or later, AI research will overcome this scandalous weakness.Q. Don't some people say that AI is a bad idea?A. The philosopher John Searle says that the idea of a non-biological machine being intelligent is incoherent. He proposes the Chinese room argumentwww-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/chinese.html The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus says that AI is impossible. The computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum says the idea is obscene, anti-human and immoral. Various people have said that since artificial intelligence hasn't reached human level by now, it must be impossible. Still other people are disappointed that companies they invested in went bankrupt.Q. Aren't computability theory and computational complexity the keys to AI? [Note to the layman and beginners in computer science: These are quite technical branches of mathematical logic and computer science, and the answer to the question has to be somewhat technical.]A. No. These theories are relevant but don't address the fundamental problems of AI. In the 1930s mathematical logicians, especially Kurt G?del and Alan Turing, established that there did not exist algorithms that were guaranteed to solve all problems in certain important mathematical domains. Whether a sentence of first order logic is a theorem is one example, and whether a polynomial equations in several variables has integer solutions is another. Humans solve problems in these domains all the time, and this has been offered as an argument (usually with some decorations) that computers are intrinsically incapable of doing what people do. Roger Penrose claims this. However, people can't guarantee to solve arbitrary problems in these domains either. See my Review of The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose. Moreessays and reviews defending AI research are in [McC96a].In the 1960s computer scientists, especially Steve Cook and Richard Karp developed the theory of NP-complete problem domains. Problems in these domains are solvable, but seem to take time exponential in the size of the problem. Which sentences of propositional calculus are satisfiable is a basic example of an NP-complete problem domain. Humans often solve problems in NP-complete domains in times much shorter than is guaranteed by the general algorithms, but can't solve them quickly in general.What is important for AI is to have algorithms as capable as people at solving problems. The identification of subdomains for which good algorithms exist is important, but a lot of AI problem solvers are not associated with readily identified subdomains.The theory of the difficulty of general classes of problems is called computational complexity. So far this theory hasn't interacted with AI as much as might have been hoped. Success in problem solving by humans and by AI programs seems to rely on properties of problems and problem solving methods that the neither the complexity researchers nor the AI community have been able to identify precisely.Algorithmic complexity theory as developed by Solomonoff, Kolmogorov and Chaitin (independently of one another) is also relevant. It defines the complexity of a symbolic object as the length of the shortest program that will generate it. Proving that a candidate program is the shortest or close to the shortest is an unsolvable problem, but representing objects by short programs that generate them should sometimes be illuminating even when you can't prove that the program is the shortest. Next: Branches of AI Up: WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? Previous: WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?John McCarthy 2007-11-12
Next: Branches of AIUp: WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? Previous: WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?Q. What is artificial intelligence?A. It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable.Q. Yes, but what is intelligence?A. Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world. Varying kinds and degrees of intelligence occur in people, many animals and some machines.Q. Isn't there a solid definition of intelligence that doesn't depend on relating it to human intelligence?A. Not yet. The problem is that we cannot yet characterize in general what kinds of computational procedures we want to call intelligent. We understand some of the mechanisms of intelligence and not others.Q. Is intelligence a single thing so that one can ask a yes or no question ``Is this machine intelligent or not?''?A. No. Intelligence involves mechanisms, and AI research has discovered how to make computers carry out some of them and not others. If doing a task requires only mechanisms that are well understood today, computer programs can give very impressive performances on these tasks. Such programs should be considered ``somewhat intelligent''.Q. Isn't AI about simulating human intelligence?A. Sometimes but not always or even usually. On the one hand, we canlearn something about how to make machines solve problems by observingother people or just by observing our own methods. On the other hand,most work in AI involves studying the problems the world presents tointelligence rather than studying people or animals. AI researchersare free to use methods that are not observed in people or thatinvolve much more computing than people can do.Q. What about IQ? Do computer programs have IQs?A. No. IQ is based on the rates at which intelligence develops in children. It is the ratio of the age at which a child normally makes a certain score to the child's age. The scale is extended to adults in a suitable way. IQ correlates well with various measures of success or failure in life, but making computers that can score high on IQ tests would be weakly correlated with their usefulness. For example, the ability of a child to repeat back a long sequence of digits correlates well with other intellectual abilities, perhaps because it measures how much information the child can compute with at once. However, ``digit span'' is trivial for even extremely limited computers.However, some of the problems on IQ tests are useful challenges for AI.Q. What about other comparisons between human and computer intelligence?Arthur R. Jensen [Jen98], a leading researcher in human intelligence, suggests ``as a heuristic hypothesis'' that all normal humans have the same intellectual mechanisms and that differences in intelligence are related to ``quantitative biochemical and physiological conditions''. I see them as speed, short term memory, and the ability to form accurate and retrievable long term memories.Whether or not Jensen is right about human intelligence, the situation in AI today is the reverse.Computer programs have plenty of speed and memory but their abilities correspond to the intellectual mechanisms that program designers understand well enough to put in programs. Some abilities that children normally don't develop till they are teenagers may be in, and some abilities possessed by two year olds are still out. The matter is further complicated by the fact that the cognitive sciences still have not succeeded in determining exactly what the human abilities are. Very likely the organization of the intellectual mechanisms for AI can usefully be different from that in people.Whenever people do better than computers on some task or computers use a lot of computation to do as well as people, this demonstrates that the program designers lack understanding of the intellectual mechanisms required to do the task efficiently.Q. When did AI research start?A. After WWII, a number of people independently started to work on intelligent machines. The English mathematician Alan Turing may have been the first. He gave a lecture on it in 1947. He also may have been the first to decide that AI was best researched by programming computers rather than by building machines. By the late 1950s, there were many researchers on AI, and most of them were basing their work on programming computers.Q. Does AI aim to put the human mind into the computer?A. Some researchers say they have that objective, but maybe they are using the phrase metaphorically. The human mind has a lot of peculiarities, and I'm not sure anyone is serious about imitating all of them.Q. What is the Turing test?A. Alan Turing's 1950 article Computing Machinery and Intelligence [Tur50] discussed conditions for considering a machine to be intelligent. He argued that if the machine could successfully pretend to be human to a knowledgeable observer then you certainly should consider it intelligent. This test would satisfy most people but not all philosophers. The observer could interact with the machine and a human by teletype (to avoid requiring that the machine imitate the appearance or voice of the person), and the human would try to persuade the observer that it was human and the machine would try to fool the observer.The Turing test is a one-sided test. A machine that passes the test should certainly be considered intelligent, but a machine could still be considered intelligent without knowing enough about humans to imitate a human.Daniel Dennett's book Brainchildren [Den98] has an excellent discussion of the Turing test and the various partial Turing tests that have been implemented, i.e. with restrictions on the observer's knowledge of AI and the subject matter of questioning. It turns out that some people are easily led into believing that a rather dumb program is intelligent.Q. Does AI aim at human-level intelligence?A. Yes. The ultimate effort is to make computer programs that can solve problems and achieve goals in the world as well as humans. However, many people involved in particular research areas are much less ambitious.Q. How far is AI from reaching human-level intelligence? When will it happen?A. A few people think that human-level intelligence can be achieved by writing large numbers of programs of the kind people are now writing and assembling vast knowledge bases of facts in the languages now used for expressing knowledge.However, most AI researchers believe that new fundamental ideas are required, and therefore it cannot be predicted when human-level intelligence will be achieved.Q. Are computers the right kind of machine to be made intelligent?A. Computers can be programmed to simulate any kind of machine.Many researchers invented non-computer machines, hoping that they would be intelligent in different ways than the computer programs could be. However, they usually simulate their invented machines on a computer and come to doubt that the new machine is worth building. Because many billions of dollars that have been spent in making computers faster and faster, another kind of machine would have to be very fast to perform better than a program on a computer simulating the machine.Q. Are computers fast enough to be intelligent?A. Some people think much faster computers are required as well as new ideas. My own opinion is that the computers of 30 years ago. were fast enough if only we knew how to program them. Of course, quite apart from the ambitions of AI researchers, computers will keep getting faster.Q. What about parallel machines?A. Machines with many processors are much faster than single processors can be. Parallelism itself presents no advantages, and parallel machines are somewhat awkward to program. When extreme speed is required, it is necessary to face this awkwardness.Q. What about making a ``child machine'' that could improve by reading and by learning from experience?A. This idea has been proposed many times, starting in the 1940s. Eventually, it will be made to work. However, AI programs haven't yet reached the level of being able to learn much of what a child learns from physical experience. Nor do present programs understand language well enough to learn much by reading.Q. Might an AI system be able to bootstrap itself to higher and higher level intelligence by thinking about AI?A. I think yes, but we aren't yet at a level of AI at which this process can begin.Q. What about chess?A. Alexander Kronrod, a Russian AI researcher, said ``Chess is the Drosophila of AI.'' He was making an analogy with geneticists' use of that fruit fly to study inheritance. Playing chess requires certain intellectual mechanisms and not others. Chess programs now play at grandmaster level, but they do it with limited intellectual mechanisms compared to those used by a human chess player, substituting large amounts of computation for understanding. Once we understand these mechanisms better, we can build human-level chess programs that do far less computation than do present programs.Unfortunately, the competitive and commercial aspects of making computers play chess have taken precedence over using chess as a scientific domain. It is as if the geneticists after 1910 had organized fruit fly races and concentrated their efforts on breeding fruit flies that could win these races.Q. What about Go? A. The Chinese and Japanese game of Go is also a board game in which the players take turns moving. Go exposes the weakness of our present understanding of the intellectual mechanisms involved in human game playing. Go programs are very bad players, in spite of considerable effort (not as much as for chess). The problem seems to be that a position in Go has to be divided mentally into a collection of subpositions which are first analyzed separately followed by an analysis of their interaction. Humans use this in chess also, but chess programs consider the position as a whole. Chess programs compensate for the lack of this intellectual mechanism by doing thousands or, in the case of Deep Blue, many millions of times as much computation.Sooner or later, AI research will overcome this scandalous weakness.Q. Don't some people say that AI is a bad idea?A. The philosopher John Searle says that the idea of a non-biological machine being intelligent is incoherent. He proposes the Chinese room argumentwww-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/chinese.html The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus says that AI is impossible. The computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum says the idea is obscene, anti-human and immoral. Various people have said that since artificial intelligence hasn't reached human level by now, it must be impossible. Still other people are disappointed that companies they invested in went bankrupt.Q. Aren't computability theory and computational complexity the keys to AI? [Note to the layman and beginners in computer science: These are quite technical branches of mathematical logic and computer science, and the answer to the question has to be somewhat technical.]A. No. These theories are relevant but don't address the fundamental problems of AI. In the 1930s mathematical logicians, especially Kurt G?del and Alan Turing, established that there did not exist algorithms that were guaranteed to solve all problems in certain important mathematical domains. Whether a sentence of first order logic is a theorem is one example, and whether a polynomial equations in several variables has integer solutions is another. Humans solve problems in these domains all the time, and this has been offered as an argument (usually with some decorations) that computers are intrinsically incapable of doing what people do. Roger Penrose claims this. However, people can't guarantee to solve arbitrary problems in these domains either. See my Review of The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose. Moreessays and reviews defending AI research are in [McC96a].In the 1960s computer scientists, especially Steve Cook and Richard Karp developed the theory of NP-complete problem domains. Problems in these domains are solvable, but seem to take time exponential in the size of the problem. Which sentences of propositional calculus are satisfiable is a basic example of an NP-complete problem domain. Humans often solve problems in NP-complete domains in times much shorter than is guaranteed by the general algorithms, but can't solve them quickly in general.What is important for AI is to have algorithms as capable as people at solving problems. The identification of subdomains for which good algorithms exist is important, but a lot of AI problem solvers are not associated with readily identified subdomains.The theory of the difficulty of general classes of problems is called computational complexity. So far this theory hasn't interacted with AI as much as might have been hoped. Success in problem solving by humans and by AI programs seems to rely on properties of problems and problem solving methods that the neither the complexity researchers nor the AI community have been able to identify precisely.Algorithmic complexity theory as developed by Solomonoff, Kolmogorov and Chaitin (independently of one another) is also relevant. It defines the complexity of a symbolic object as the length of the shortest program that will generate it. Proving that a candidate program is the shortest or close to the shortest is an unsolvable problem, but representing objects by short programs that generate them should sometimes be illuminating even when you can't prove that the program is the shortest. Next: Branches of AI Up: WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? Previous: WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?John McCarthy 2007-11-12
Monday 18 June 2018
Google Rolls Out New Addition to 'Mute This Ad' Feature
Google plans to expand the new tool to control ads on YouTube, Search, and Gmail in the coming. months, Jon Krafcik, group product manager for data privacy and transparency wrote in a blog post on Thursday.The new feature is an addition to Google's ad-muting tools that have been around since 2012 that allow users to hide specific unwanted ads or advertisers.
Friday 15 June 2018
Best SUVs, crossovers and MPVs on show at Auto Expo 2018
Not much has been revealed about the Future S concept apart from a silhouette of its dimensions, but the car is expected to be slotted below the Vitar
Google Rolls Out New Addition to 'Mute This Ad' Feature
Google plans to expand the new tool to control ads on YouTube, Search, and Gmail in. the coming months, Jon Krafcik, group product manager for data privacy and transparency wrote in a blog post on Thursday.The new feature is an addition to Google's ad-muting tools that have been around since 2012 that allow users to hide specific unwanted ads or advertisers.
Thursday 14 June 2018
Dog Breeds, Adoption, Bringing a Dog Home and Care
CheckmarkMust be at least 8 characters Must contain at least 3 out of. 4 of these: CheckmarkCapital letters CheckmarkLowercase letters CheckmarkSpecial characters CheckmarkNumbers
Asthma Symptoms, Diagnosis, Management & Treatment
Asthma OverviewAsthma is a chronic disease involving the airways in the lungs. These airways, or bronchial tubes, allow air to come in and out of the lungs.If you have asthma your airways are always inflamed. They become even more swollen and the muscles around the airways can tighten when something triggers your symptoms. This makes it difficult for air to move in and out of the lungs, causing symptoms such as coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath and/or chest tightness.For many asthma sufferers, timing of these symptoms is closely related to physical activity. And, some otherwise healthy people can develop asthma symptoms only when exercising. This is called exercise-induced bronchoconstriction (EIB), or exercise-induced asthma (EIA). Staying active is an important way to stay healthy, so asthma shouldn't keep you on the sidelines. Your physician can develop a management plan to keep your symptoms under control before, during and after physical activity.People with a family history of allergies or asthma are more prone to developing asthma. Many people with asthma also have allergies. This is called allergic asthma.Occupational asthma is caused by inhaling fumes, gases, dust or other potentially harmful substances while on the job.Childhood asthma impacts millions of children and their families. In fact, the majority of children who develop asthma do so before the age of five.There is no cure for asthma, but once it is properly diagnosed and a treatment plan is in place you will be able to manage your condition, and your quality of life will improve.An allergist / immunologist is the best qualified physician in diagnosing and treating asthma. With the help of your allergist, you can take control of your condition and participate in normal activities.Keep pace with the latest information and connect with others. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.Test your knowledge about EIB and asthma. »Play our Allergy and Asthma Games with Mr. Nose-it-All » Asthma Symptoms & DiagnosisAsthma SymptomsAccording to the leading experts in asthma, the symptoms of asthma and best treatment for you or your child may be quite different than for someone else with asthma.The most common symptom is wheezing. This is a scratchy or whistling sound when you breathe. Other symptoms include:• Shortness of breath• Chest tightness or pain• Chronic coughing• Trouble sleeping due to coughing or wheezingAsthma symptoms, also called asthma flare-ups or asthma attacks, are often caused by allergies and exposure to allergens such as pet dander, dust mites, pollen or mold. Non-allergic triggers include smoke, pollution or cold air or changes in weather.Asthma symptoms may be worse during exercise, when you have a cold or during times of high stress.Children with asthma may show the same symptoms as adults with asthma: coughing, wheezing and shortness of breath. In some children chronic cough may be the only symptom.If your child has one or more of these common symptoms, make an appointment with an allergist / immunologist:• Coughing that is constant or that is made worse by viral infections, happens while your child is asleep, or is triggered by exercise and cold air• Wheezing or whistling sound when your child exhales• Shortness of breath or rapid breathing, which may be associated with exercise• Chest tightness (a young child may say that his chest "hurts" or "feels funny")• Fatigue (your child may slow down or stop playing)• Problems feeding or grunting during feeding (infants)• Avoiding sports or social activities• Problems sleeping due to coughing or difficulty breathingPatterns in asthma symptoms are important and can help your doctor make a diagnosis. Pay attention to when symptoms occur:• At night or early morning• During or after exercise• During certain seasons• After laughing or crying• When exposed to common asthma triggersAsthma DiagnosisAn allergist diagnoses asthma by taking a thorough medical history and performing breathing tests to measure how well your lungs work.One of these tests is called spirometry. You will take a deep breath and blow into a sensor to measure the amount of air your lungs can hold and the speed of the air you inhale or exhale. This test diagnoses asthma severity and measures how well treatment is working.Many people with asthma also have allergies, so your doctor may perform allergy testing. Treating the underlying allergic triggers for your asthma will help you avoid asthma symptoms. Videos: Choosing Wisely » Asthma Treatment & ManagementThere is no cure for asthma, but symptoms can be controlled with effective asthma treatment and management. This involves taking your medications as directed and learning to avoid triggers that cause your asthma symptoms. Your allergist will prescribe the best medications for your condition and provide you with specific instructions for using them.Controller medications are taken daily and include inhaled corticosteroids (fluticasone (Flovent Diskus, Flovent HFA), budesonide (Pulmicort Flexhaler), mometasone (Asmanex), ciclesonide (Alvesco), flunisolide (Aerobid), beclomethasone (Qvar) and others).Combination inhalers contain an inhaled corticosteroid plus a long-acting beta-agonist (LABA). LABAs are symptom-controllers that are helpful in opening your airways. However, in certain people they may carry some risks.LABAs should never be prescribed as the sole therapy for asthma. Current recommendations are for them to be used only along with inhaled corticosteroids. Combination medications include fluticasone and salmeterol (Advair Diskus, Advair HFA), budesonide and formoterol (Symbicort), and mometasone and formoterol (Dulera).Leukotriene modifiers are oral medications that include montelukast (Singulair), zafirlukast (Accolate) and zileuton (Zyflo, Zyflo CR).Quick-relief or rescue medications are used to quickly relax and open the airways and relieve symptoms during an asthma flare-up, or are taken before exercising if prescribed. These include: short-acting beta-agonists. These inhaled bronchodilator (brong-koh-DIE-lay-tur) medications include albuterol (ProAir HFA, Ventolin HFA, others), levalbuterol (Xopenex HFA) and pirbuterol (Maxair Autohaler). Quick-relief medications do not take the place of controller medications. If you rely on rescue relief more than twice a week, it is time to see your allergist.Oral and intravenous corticosteroids may be required for acute asthma flare-ups or for severe symptoms. Examples include prednisone and methylprednisolone. They can cause serious side effects if used on a long term basis.Visit the AAAAI Drug Guide for a complete list of medications commonly used to treat asthma.If you are pregnant, you may be hesitant about taking medications, including those for asthma. This can be a mistake for your health and that of your baby-to-be. Continue taking your prescribed asthma medications and make an appointment with your allergist to discuss treatments that will help you have a healthy pregnancy. Additionally, you may want to enroll in a study designed to monitor medications and pregnancy.People with asthma are at risk of developing complications from respiratory infections such as influenza and pneumonia. That is why it is important for asthma sufferers, especially adults, to get vaccinated annually.With proper treatment and an. asthma management plan, you can minimize your symptoms and enjoy a better quality of life.
Google Pixelbook may receive Windows 10 certification from Microsoft
The HLK is used as part of Microsoft's Hardware Compatibility Program to certify hardware can ship with Windows. Gaining certification for hardware
Google Rolls Out New Addition to 'Mute This Ad' Feature
Google plans to. expand the new tool to control ads on YouTube, Search, and Gmail in the coming months, Jon Krafcik, group product manager for data privacy and transparency wrote in a blog post on Thursday.The new feature is an addition to Google's ad-muting tools that have been around since 2012 that allow users to hide specific unwanted ads or advertisers.
Wednesday 13 June 2018
Ford to unveil Figo-based cross hatch on January 31
Ford has announced it will take the wraps off its new Figo-based cross-hatchback on January 31, 2018. The cross-hatch has been spied testing a number of times and we have had an exclusive drive in a pre-production prototype of the model, as well.Reportedly named the Freestyle, the crossover version of the Figo will sport rugged, SUV-esque cosmetic changes, including a higher ground clearance, roof rails, body cladding, fatter tyres and larger wheels.On the inside, lower-spec variants of the Figo-based crossover will share the 6.0-inch touchscreen infotainment system. with lower-spec EcoSport trims. Higher-spec models will have the 8.0-inch system with Ford's Sync 3, instead. The top-spec trims will also get six airbags, ABS and ESP.The highlight of what is expected to be called the Ford Freestyle is under the bonnet. A new 95hp/115Nm, 1.2-litre, three-cylinder petrol engine from the carmaker's Dragon series, will debut on the cross-hatchback. It will be mated to a new five-speed manual transmission from Getrag, replacing the older IB5 unit.
Limited edition Tata Tigor Buzz launched
Celebrating the first anniversary of the Tigor, Tata Motors on Wednesday announced the launch of a limited edition model of its new-generation compact sedan. Christened Tigor Buzz, the edition has been priced at Rs 5.68 lakh for the petrol and Rs 6.57 lakh for the diesel version (both ex-showroom, Delhi).The anniversary model is based on the XT trim and comes equipped with a five-speed manual transmission (MT). Alongside the standard features of the Tigor XT, the limited edition features some additional exterior and interior elements, including glossy black painted roof, piano black ORVMs (outside rear view mirrors), dual-tone wheel cover, front grille with coloured insert, 'limited edition' badge, berry red rings on AC vents and premium full fabric seats.
Google now allows users to mute "reminder ads" under 'Mute This Ad' feature
Google has added a new feature to its 'Mute This Ad' feature, which allows users to mute reminder ads. The new option will be visible as a new control in Ad Settings and will sync across devices, which means if a user mutes an ad on their smartphone, it will also be muted while surfing the web on their laptop. As per Google's blog post, the new tool will allow users to exercise more control over the ads they view along with more transparency.In layman terms, reminder ads follow a user across sites to remind them of buying the item which they added to cart but didn't check out. Giving an example of the ad, Google said, "You visit Snow Boot Co.'s website, add a pair of boots to your shopping cart, but you don't buy them because you want to keep looking around. The next time that you're shopping online, Snow Boot Co. might show you ads that encourage you to come back to their site and buy those boots. Reminder ads like these can be useful, but if you aren't shopping for Snow Boot Co.'s boots anymore, then you don't need a reminder about them. A new control within Ads Settings will enable you to mute Snow Boot Co.'s reminder ads."
How to Add a Pinterest Hover Button to your Blogger Images
Update September 20, 2016: The developer of the code mentioned in this blog article updated the code on September 18. If your hover buttons recently stopped working, make sure you update your blog template with the updated code.
Make it easy for your blog visitors to Pin your images — and add a Pinterest hover button to your Blogger images! What's a "hover button"? It's a button that appears when you put your mouse over an image. Go ahead and test it out on this image below. Clicking on the pink Pinterest button that appears in the middle of the image will allow you to pin this image to your Pinterest boards.
Here are the instructions for Blogger blogs. (This doesn't work on Blogger's Dynamic Views templates or on mobile templates.) For self-hosted WordPress blogs (aka wordpress.org blogs), see this post: How to Add a Pinterest Hover Button to your WordPress Images.
NOTE: This requires editing your Blogger template. Before proceeding with the instructions below, I recommend that you backup your Blogger template first!
- In your Blogger Dashboard click on Template and then Edit HTML.
- Scroll down to the bottom of the code and find this line:
